Only massive relief and reform efforts may prevent flood-devastated nation's slide into chaosBy William B. Milam
August 30, 2010
As the floodwaters have swept down into southern Pakistan, devastating food- and cotton-producing areas, threatening dams that have held lesser tides back for many years, interrupting power generation, and displacing added millions of poor, rural Pakistanis every day, the humanitarian crisis calls for strong and swift international action. But Pakistan's friends must realize that these floods are so severe that they also raise existential questions: Can the Pakistani state and society survive this natural catastrophe?
It appears to me to be a classic, if microcosmic example of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's theory that highly improbable events may have catastrophic impacts on complex, resilient but fragile systems.
That Pakistan is an increasingly fragile and vulnerable state, in which social cohesion appears to be inexorably attenuating, seems uncontestable these days. The long list of ills that have brought Pakistan to this precarious stage are well known. It is at war with one of its own creations — the so-called Pakistani Taliban, who use indiscriminate terrorist violence to intimidate the state and society into acquiescence to the group's terrorist aims. Other extremist groups that the state also created to fight proxy wars with India are basically now beyond its control and looking to force continuation of the India fixation that has vexed Pakistani politics for so long.
Governance under elected civilian rule or when run by the military has proved hopeless. The half-illiterate society is dominated by a rigid Islamist narrative that blames the West for all its ills, and there is no alternative narrative stressing the moderate and humane tenets of mainstream Islam. The "demographic dividend," a burgeoning young population, needing a vibrant, growing economy that would create decent job opportunities, faces instead a sagging economy badly in need of reform and stabilization before sustained growth is possible. Among the many other inhibiting factors are the social development indicators, which lag sadly behind most of those in the rest of developing world.
This list of structural deficiencies is formidable and frightening, yet experts still do not agree whether Pakistan is drifting slowly, but inevitably, toward some sort of failure — or whether it can, with sustained effort by a stable civilian government over several generations, and with the help of its foreign friends, turn things around and join the ranks of modern nations. One of the more interesting questions is what, if anything, could serve as the "game changer" for good or bad, i.e. either stop the bleeding or hasten the demise.
Full article:
http://www.latimes.com/topic/bs-ed-pakistan-20100830,0,5825580.storyWilliam B. Milam, a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C, is former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh and author of "Bangladesh and Pakistan: Flirting with Failure in South Asia." 
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